Human Evolution

In terms of human evolution there is what man has become from what he has been, theories abound, and what man may yet become, hope abounds.

The most useful inquisition into human evolution, know thyself.

 

A couple of more points I meant to say to FranklinS:

The so-called 'primitive' people are not like animals. There is no alpha male that gets all the females while weaker ones don't get anything. In fact, in my experience I would say that tribal males have a better chance of having partners than those of civilized males. For one thing there are not as much of the trappings of status and other problems that you have in civilized society that determines how lucky you are in that regard.

Secondly, to assume that a male who does not have a woman would be less likely to lay his life on the line for his tribe (whatever the circumstance) is to not understand what it means to be part of a tribe. I got a glimpse of this on a vision quest--it is a very powerful love between all the people...

 

Did you actually read everything the OP posted? Because I just spent....way too long- a looong time (long!), reading all that and I can tell by your posts that you just skimmed part of the article and don't understand the theories he is proposing. I'm not going to speculate here on whether the theories are right or wrong, but they are interesting to think about anyway. (I will, however, say I think there are some valid points- many of them actually, however I do believe the OP "jumped" from, say exhibit A- to conclusion Z- when there are other possible explanations... however, that is what constitutes a theory so that is fine...interesting anyways...)

 

Your fractured version of evolution is a warmed over version of nineteenth century Social Darwinism, heavily laden with moralism, progress and the survival of the fittest. It also leaves out the crucial concept of genetic mutation, so that genocidal eugenic policies qualify as natural selection!

 

Watch out, AmericanTerrorist, you don't want to be associated with the likes of me. I am just waiting for the liberal inquisition to call me before their court and demand that I repent my politically incorrect views. Since I have been banned from every other forum, I might as well post here for the brief time it should take for the mods here to ban me.

 

Where did I say this? I only commented about Mexico which is a completely different case than the tribes from North America that you mentioned. There are generally 3 cases of cultures, innocence before developed culture, high morality which leads to rising culture, and immorality in declining cultures. The North American tribes were innocent. But most of Mexico was inhabited by declining or decayed cultures which were immoral. The Aztecs were particularly nasty people, far worse than the European were.

I don't know enough about the North American natives to say much. What I know is from "Sex and Culture" by Unwin which says that that their requirements for female premarital chastity varied and were generally lower than that of the Europeans of that time. Of course male chastity is totally irrelevant.

Also, the only aspect of morality that matters in terms of evolution is the morality that one applies to members of one's own culture. How one treats members of other cultures/tribes is irrelevant.

 

Then I urge you to read Unwin's "Sex and Culture" and post your feedback here. I am not an anthropologist and I have only had some limited exposure to primitive tribes, so most of my information is indirect. I have read a few anthropology books but this isn't one of my primary interests.

 

As should be clear from my original post, I consider ALL people not only to be like animals but to be animals. Humans are just another species.

As for "civilized" people, I consider modern culture (post-Christian Western culture) to be utterly despicable, far worse than any primitive culture. Western culture peaked between 1600 and 1800 when Calvinist-like beliefs caused morality. And during that time, when monogamy was enforced and society was mostly free of sluts, men had little trouble finding wives.

I don't know what your last comment is referring to. It isn't a question of whether a man has a woman at the moment, but rather whether he can expect to have one and whether he can trust that other men won't try to take her away from him.

 

Actually I believe I do have that in my library---I'll have to take a look. I haven't read it if I do, only skimmed over it---but it does seem like a title I would have. Unfortunately over the years I have bought numerous books that I would love to read, but haven't had time, and they eventually end up on a shelf----I'll look around.

 

Yes, humans are just another species of animal, but we do not have social, intimate, sexual, and even insterspecial relationships as most animals do. The alpha male dynamic, for example, may still play a role in social relationships in a business setting for example. But that role is more subconscious and symbol-based than it is blatant, or the sole deciding factor in such relations. Physical aggression has no place in a business setting for example.

Clearly you have a glorified view of that period. I could cite many examples, but just look at art---and the subliminal, explicit, and sometimes blatant sexual imagery and connotations. Have you studied the art of Vermeer (1606-1669), or Rembrandt (1632 - 1675) for example? Or Rubens (1577 - 1640), or my all time favorite, Fragonard (1732 - 1806). Fragonard's art is often so ripe with sexual symbolism that a princess, or a queen (I forget offhand) once commissioned numerous pieces from him for her palace, and upon delivery turned down everyone stating that they were too sexual. One of my favorite court pieces (The Secret Meeting) is of a young man sneaking over a palace wall to visit a young girl in the garden, who is checking the other way to make sure no family members or servants or other guardians of her chastity are looking. If you have any doubt over what is about to happen, the shapes of the trees and foliage of the surrounding garden will make it clear, but only if you know what to look for in such paintings. The young woman with a baby in the statue above her (pointing down to her if I remember correctly) makes it clear what the final result will be---some 9 months later.

In fact, I actually own a lithograph from Europe, dated from the 1700's by an unknown artist. It is of a young man who is teaching a young girl to play the flute. It seems like an innocent pastoral scene. But it is filled with sexual symbolism, and some very explicit shapes---people are amazed when I start pointing things out to them.

The problem is sexual repression creates all kinds of harm and problems within society. And it always finds release. Sadly, Indo-European culture and the cultures that preceded it in Europe, the Middle East, and even into the East, over the past 2000 years, have allowed man to find his sexual release not matter how sexually repressive the culture has been----especially without consequence. Women on the other hand during these periods have always been the victims, regardless of which side of morality they have found themselves. A good example is the Victorian Era, where sexual repression was also excessive. But men needed release so there were plenty of women to provide that service within the saloons and cathouses. And their services were sought out much more than in modern times. Wives on the other hand were such good Christian women that they suffered in silence about things they would be 'dirty' to think of. This developed into a malady called hysteria (from the Greek word for womb). Doctor's relieved it by manually bringing women to orgasm.

But don't kid yourself. Even when Calvinism was at its peak, there were sluts and prostitutes and traditions that would make a modest woman blush today.

My comment refers to this, which is the same concept you referred to:

You apparently assume that a man is more likely going to lay his life down for his tribe if he has a woman back home to go back to and that other men are not going take her. But this is based entirely on a modern western understanding of marital relations and morality.

First of all, most hunter-gatherer and early planter culture tribes do not fight to kill off the 'other' tribe, nor do they fight to take over land or to control others. Battle is a proving ground for the men to become men, it is a way to release archetypical tendencies of violence and to control it, and so forth. Therefore fighting among such tribes provides an important social purpose. It is dangerous and people get killed, but the real purpose is not to kill, but to gain honor.

Now what if you were a member of a tribe where you knew your wife was attached to you, so you knew that after you got back, that your wife would be there for you. But you also knew that while she was gone, she would have sexual relations with others but you didn't care, because you had the freedom to have sexual relations with others as well. In fact, any time you brought meat back to the tribe, sex was a way of thanking you for some of your meat. And if you are lucky she might even be pregnant when you get home. You don't concern yourself with who the father is, that is not important because she is attached to you and her child will be attached to you (therefore you are the father), and all three of you are attached to the tribe. This is one of many different ways that human relations and bonds take place in cultures other than yours, and with morality and ethics that are alien to your own.

 

I do agree that the only aspect of morality that matters to a specific culture is the one that applies to members of that culture.

How one treats a member of another culture is very relevant if you believe it is ok to cause harm to them, or forcefully apply your moral standards to them, or judge them based on your moral standards.

In such a case you are dealing with the duality that grew out of the planter cultures and is so much a part of Christian belief and Western philosophy. It is the zeitgiest of the in-group vs the out-group, which empowered manifest destiny to kill, enslave, and destroy a whole continent of people.

On the other hand if you mean it is irrelevant because you are referring to your standards as it would apply to the other culture because they have different norms, then I agree.

Anyway---if you sincerely believe this, or at least the first part of your statement, then why do you spend so much time judging other cultures as decadent and morally inferior?

 

My morality isn't Christian morality, it is more Old Testament morality. There is nothing wrong sex itself. I support prostitution as a reasonable sexual outlet for men. The most basic rule of sexual morality is no adultery which means no sex between a wife and a man other than her husband. Female premarital sex and divorce should be discouraged. Sluts are a cultural plague and should be minimized. I think Calvinism did a good job enforcing Old Testament morality. Modern morality, both Christian and secular, is horrible.

Then you are committing evolutionary suicide. Those men who successfully mate-guard will replace your genes. This is why mate-guarding is some common among mammals. Chimps also compete for females but in a different way. The bottom line is that it is in the interest of all males of all species to compete for females and stable groups of males can only form when they work out some solution to this competition.

I only say this to identify other potential members of my tribe, who would feel the same way. In my interactions with members of modern culture, I am totally amoral and I don't judge anything except what I can get for myself.

Actually, the reason I joined this forum is because I googled "free speech forum" and found this place. I am curious to know whether free speech exists at all in modern culture, and my posts here are to test this.

 

You're just being un-greatful to my extrinsic attitude today when it comes to may I say being-as-an-Object. Chemical reaction in the brain and all that.:sunny:

 

Spirit and Matter are equilibrized in Man. On the ascending arc, Spirit is slowly re-asserting itself at the expense of the physical, or matter, so that, at the close of the seventh Race of the Seventh Round, the Monad will find itself as
free from matter and all its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the experience and wisdom, the fruition of all its personal lives, without their evil and temptations.
This order of evolution is found also in Genesis (ch. 1 and 2) if one reads it in its true esoteric sense, for chapter i. contains the history of the first Three Rounds, as well as that of the first Three Races of the Fourth, up to that moment when Man is called to conscious life by the Elohim of Wisdom. In the first chapter, animals, whales and fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam.* In the second, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only appear after him. Even the state of mental torpor and unconsciousness of the first two races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is symbolized, in the second chapter of Genesis, by the deep sleep of Adam. It was the dreamless sleep of mental inaction, the slumber of the Soul and Mind, which was meant by that “sleep,” and not at all the physiological process of differentiation of sexes, as a learned French theorist (M. Naudin) imagined.
The Puranas, the Chaldean and Egyptian fragments, and also the Chinese traditions, all show an agreement with the Secret Doctrine as to the process and order of evolution. We find in them the corroboration of almost all our teaching. For instance: the statement concerning the oviparous mode of procreation of the Third Race, and even a hint at a less innocent mode of the procreation of the first mammal forms, “gigantic, transparent, dumb and monstrous they were,” says the Commentary. Study the stories of the several Rishis and their multifarious progeny; e.g., Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents and Nagas — the oviparous brood; Kasyapa was grandsire, through his wife Tamra, of the birds and of Garuda, king of the feathered tribe; while by his wife Surabhi, he was the parent of cows and buffaloes, etc., etc.
“. . . . . In these were incarnated the Lords of the three (upper) worlds, the various classes of Rudras, who had been Tushitas, who had been Jayas, who are Adityas;” for, as explained by Parasara, “There are a hundred appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras.”
Some of the descendants of the primitive Nagas, the Serpents of Wisdom, peopled America, when its continent arose during the palmy days of the great Atlantis, (America being the Patala or Antipodes of Jambu-Dwipa, not of Bharata-Varsha). Otherwise, whence the traditions and legends — the latter always more true than history, as says Augustin Thierry — and even the identity in the names of certain “medicine men” and priests, who exist to this day in Mexico? We shall have to say something of the Nargals and the Nagals and also of Nagalism, called “devil-worship” by the Missionaries.
In almost all the Puranas, the story of the “Sacrifice of Daksha” is given, the oldest account of which is to be found in Vayu Purana. Allegorical as it is, there is more meaning and biological revelation in it to a Naturalist, than in all the pseudo-scientific vagaries, which are regarded as learned theories and hypotheses.
Daksha, who is regarded as the Chief Progenitor, is, moreover, pointed out as the creator of physical man in the “fable,” which makes him lose his head from his body in the general strife between the gods and the Raumas. This head, being burnt in the fire, is replaced by the head of a ram (Kasi-Khanda). Now the ram’s head and horns are ever the symbol of generating power and of reproductive force, and are phallic. As we have shown, it is Daksha who establishes the era of men engendered by sexual intercourse. But this mode of procreation did not occur suddenly, as one may think, and required long ages before it became the one “natural” way. Therefore, his sacrifice to the gods is shown as interfered with by Siva, the destroying deity, evolution and progress personified, who is the regenerator at the same time; who destroys things under one form but to recall them to life under another more perfect type. Siva-Rudra creates the terrible Virabhadra (born of his breath) the “thousand-headed, thousand-armed” (etc.) monster, and commissions him to destroy the sacrifice prepared by Daksha. Then Virabhadra, “abiding in the region of the ghosts (ethereal men) . . . .



From the Secret doctrine

 

So you think it is fair that men can gain sexual satisfaction from sources other than their own wives, while wives are unable to do the same? Aren't women human also?

Would you stone me if I were to plant two different crops next to each other? Or if I was to wear clothing of two different threads? Or were to work on the sabbath (I am a writer, and I do write as a passion. I pay little attention to what day it is---if I have a thought that I need to get down onto paper, or a solution to a problem I have reached, or simply have the urge to write----I will write on any day-------with a passion). Being that it is the Modern World and stoning is not allowed, would you at least consider me a decadent sinner for such things?

But if someone fathers your child and you father someone elses child, then your genes are passed on. But again there are all kinds of traditions regarding this. But in this particular case, evolutionary suicide is not a worry or concern of theirs. What makes one person so special that their particular genes have to survive over someone elses? We are all human. Certainly, I want to father my own children (which I have done), and I hope they pass on my genes too. But I was not raised in such a culture. But I understand that they do not care about the genetic history---they care about the human and the tribe and family member. Their child is a human and brought up in love, from their nuclear family, and the tribe as a whole. That is all that is important to them.

By the way, I have 5 step kids---children of my wife----and I have tried very hard to make sure that I give them the same love as the child I fathered with my wife. We are a family, they are my children too, and they are all equally human.

Well, you have been able to post your ideas. Free speech allows others to debate it with you. We are all entitled to our own beliefs and our own opinions. I think that you are free to post whatever you believe as long as you do not get malicious to anyone, or post anything too graphic, or break other rules like trying to push products on to people or sexually harass others, and so forth. Or being a Calvinist or Staunch believer in Old Testament morality (I'M JOKING! I'M JOKING! on the Calvinist and Old Testament morality stuff, I'm joking.)

 

There is a basic asymmetry that the Bible recognizes but modern culture doesn't. The wife having extramarital sex is an evolutionary crime because it can lead the father raising a kid that isn't his, but the husband having extramarital sex isn't an evolutionary crime because it has no real impact on the wife. The Bible outlaws evolutionary crimes. What the husband can do should be decided by the couple.

The point of the prohibitions against mixing is not to mix things that you don't understand. We now understand how planting crops together affects each crop and what mixing thread does. A modern application of the prohibition would be against genetically modified foods where we mix DNA in ways we don't understand. The prohibition isn't a moral prohibition but is rather a warning against mindless mixing which may be harmful.

The Sabbath is one possible moral exercise. You should keep it if you choose a biblical path to morality. If you follow another religion, then you will have some other moral exercises. Or if you are a modernist with no religion, then you will simply be immoral. I wrote 2 articles about the Sabbath which I think is very important:

http://www.biblicjudaism.org/Keep-the-Sabbath-tp19.html
http://www.antimodernism.org/The-Sabbath-for-Christians-tp43.html

Evolution of a species works by genetic competition within the species. I recommend reading The Selfish Gene. If your behavior results in a lower reproductive rate than someone else's behavior, then their genes will replace yours eventually. In the promiscuous tribal case that I discussed, the man who avoids war and guards his wife will genetically beat men who don't mate-guard.

I'll add that "we are all human" means as much to me as saying that I should care about cockroaches because we are all animals. I regard the average human about as I regard the average cockroach.

I'm shocked that I haven't been banned yet. I have been banned from every other forum run by members of modern culture, probably close to 100 forums by now.

 

The initial premise of this statement is patently false. The bible is a book, a repository for symbols which must of necessity be interpreted. The bible recognizes nothing.

There is no prohibition against mixing. Creation is a law without opposite.

The Sabbath is the potential creative estate we are born into. How important are your articles from that perspective?

You entertain a supernatural perspective. Have you ever seen an above average cockroach?

Are you kidding, you are ho hum.

 

Wooo... the Bible recognizes nothing for the subject of the self- being heartened for divine judgement. Then we get it from the self-responsibility. And in the Self one has nothing for the generation of futuristic tales of defeat in the good concern of being objectively absorbed?

 

More significantly, the Bible came out of a culture that was largely rebellious against the older goddess cults, and was very male focused. So I think it was more than just, evolutionary crime. It was a result of a power struggle, a struggle over property rights, and a struggle of the rational mind (representing elements of the psyche that would come to be represented by conscious mind), over the irrational mind (representing elements that would become largely relegated to the subconscious mind).

Interesting point.

I am not a Christian, nor do I adhere to the beliefs of any organized religion. However I am very spiritual, and walk the Red Road as the Native Americans refer to it----follow Lakota traditions to be exact.

If your friends are having babies and you are not, is that going to really destroy the human race? There is an innate tendency towards promiscuity because it allows for healthier offspring. That is why women are more vocal during sex---it has been found that in species where the females are very vocal during sex, the purpose is to call more males to the site where she is mating. In this manner, other males become aroused, and when given the chance will mate with her.

Anyway---I would like to have my bloodline continue, but only for selfish reasons------I could care less about the evolutionary impact of my sperm...

 

All expressions of love are maximal. We share our thoughts by lending consonant expressions as we are moved and this is how we re-cognize symbols. Obviously we feel there is something to be said and the reason we recognize what might be said is that the I am belongs to everyone. The bible is useful as it functions, a time and purpose for everything, not because of belief.

Not that belief is without it's function as a symbol temporarily chosen to represent an unknown variable. I say temporarily because all things are revealed in time. Blind faith is another way of saying blind.

Personal responsibility looks like this;

The person down the road says this and the person up the road says this but who do you say that I am. By these words are you justified and no man has given them to you.